A local woman missing- Mary Kubica

We talk awhile. As we do, I find that I like Shelby Tebow. I really
like her. She’s practical, not pretentious. She’s matter-of-fact. She’s
young, and it shows. I was once young, too. She has dreams for the
rest of her life. She likes helping people. She’s not working now that
she and her husband have relocated. But when she’s able, she
wants to get back to work. Her husband doesn’t want her to work. He
likes it better when she’s home.
“Tell me about your husband,” I say. It feels like a good transition.
“What about him?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Anything.”
Her husband is an insurance agent, she tells me. He was a
linebacker in college. He wanted to go pro, until a knee injury
sidelined him. He’s still bent out of shape about it. He’s three years
older than her. They started dating in high school, when she was a
freshman and he a senior. When she turned eighteen, they got
married. Shelby never went to college. She tells me how much he
loves kids, how he’ll be a great father one day. I just don’t get the
sense that one day means four weeks from now, when their baby is
due to arrive.
After a while she gets down to brass tacks. She isn’t sure she can
trust her husband to be there for her during the birth—physically,
emotionally or otherwise. He’s kind of hard core, as she calls him.
I’m not sure what she means by that. But it’s why she needs me
there.
The next time I see Shelby is two days later. We meet again at the
same coffee shop. This time I offer to buy her coffee, but she says
no; she can’t stay. She’s jumpy. She brings the signed contract. She
presses it into my hand. I take it. Both she and her husband have
signed the document.
“You were able to get him on board,” I say, smiling.
“He had his reservations,” she says. Shelby doesn’t smile.
“Like what?”
She waits a beat before she tells me. “He thinks you’re a con. He
thinks you’re ripping us off. He looked up people in your line of work.
He wants to know why you charge so much. At first he said I was out
of my damn mind if I thought we were going to pay that much for a
babysitter.”